Intel Ultra Low Power Skylake-U Lineup Revealed

While much of the attention have been focused on the i7 6700K and the i5 6600K, Intel’s latest 14nm process should shine best in the power limited mobile environment. Intel intends to be mum about their other Skylake chips, but someone has leaked slides detailing the Skylake-U ultra low power lineup.

Starting off, all of the chips are dual-core only given the limited power envelope, with the i3, i5 and i7 having hyperthreading to expose 4 logical cores. We have 2 i7s with 4MB L3 cache that breach the 3Ghz barrier at max turbo while the i5 lineup loses 1MB of cache and tops off at 3Ghz. The i3 is limited to a much more pedestrian 2.3Ghz while the Pentium and Celerons are even slower and lose another MB of cache and hyperthreading. TDP remains low at 15W max with a configurable TDP that drops as low as 7.5W.

On the GPU side, we have the HD 530 for the i3 and above at 300/1000Mhz with the i7 variant boosting an additional 50Mhz. The Pentium and Celeron are paired with the slower HD 510 that clocks slower at 300/900Mhz, with the Pentium iGPU boosting 50Mhz higher. The Intel 520 should have 24EUs (Execution Unit) while nothing about the 510 has leaked yet. It will be interesting to see if the 34% promised gain over Broadwell iGPU will manifest in the 520 or will there be other higher end iGPUs launching later.

While the desktop side of things has shown lower levels of progress, the mobile side continues to show good improvement. It wasn’t long ago that mobile CPUs hit 35W TDPs with anemic iGPUs and poor battery life. Now, we will soon have chips that are leaps and bounds ahead of their predecessors with higher IPC, clock rates and better iGPU performance, all in a smaller, cooler, and more power efficient package.